The Wilsonville – Beaverton Westside Express Service (Oregon’s first modern commuter service) Grand Opening is January 30, 2009 with free rides for the public. The following week, February 2-8 will be what TriMet is calling WES Week with trains running on the regular commuter schedule and celebrations at many of the stations. The Pacific Northwest Chapter, NRHS will have a history booth at the Tigard station on January 30 and on February 3 (Tigard Day – Past, Current, Future).
For more information, check out the Westside Express Service website for more information. I’ll be down there the entire weekend for the celebration and to try out the service.
havent heard any word on when the official WES grand opening/ribbon cutting will be, or even if there will be one. will it be jan 30 or feb 2? i get the sense that it will be friday since the start of service on monday is around 5am and there are some city sponsored celebrations for their respective stations on friday.
other than a few railfans who remember articles mentioning jan 30 being the first day open to the public, i have seen almost nothing from trimet recently alerting the public of the jan 30 service. just about everything mentions, including all ads, a feb 2 opening.
this is the most i’ve seen from trimet about the beginning of service,
it does have some basic info about jan 30 but i found this link only thru the rider insider newsletter…
http://www.trimet.org/wes/promo.htm
its puzzling to me why trimet does not have better info about the start of service
there is this info from tigard, but this sounds more about a grand opening for tigard station than for the entire line…
http://www.tigard-or.gov/downtown/commuter_rail/wes_week.asp
as is this for tualatin regarding the tualatin station…
http://www.ci.tualatin.or.us/departments/communitydevelopment/planning/CommuterRail.cfm
It may be that there is not too much hoopla because of this:
http://www.oregonlive.com/special/index.ssf/2008/12/trimet.html
I’d bet TriMet is a bit embarrassed by these revelations.
The Big Zero’s lovely penchant for hit-pieces aside, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s a public agency with a large swing in terms of cost overruns and savings.
And Portland isn’t Seattle, so don’t expect people to be screaming bloody murder beyond the trumped up coverage in the Zero.
Yeah, Portland is a classic machine politics city. Business as usual.
clearly that is playing into it.
but what were they supposed to do? the tracks had already been upgraded for the service, it would have been more wasteful to have spent all the money on the project and not have any cars to run on it.
anyhow heres another oped on wes from today, this time in favor…
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2009/01/celebrate_not_denigrate_the_ef.html
WES as a service is good but TriMet really did blunder with the Colorado Railcar thing. There are other DMU providers other but none in the US – would it have been the end of the world to order from Bombardier or something?
Tri-met just posted a video of WES testing.
http://trimet.org/tv/episode25/index.htm
Great stuff!
Maybe, maybe not. Whatever the case, there is no point on the WES route that touches the city limits of Portland. It must be those machines of Beaverton, Tigard, Tualitan and Wilsonville. Real Tammany stuff out there in the burbs.